On 9 July 2026 the European Parliament let āChat Control 1.0ā through: suspicionless mass scanning of private messages. Same thing the Parliament had already rejected twice back in March.
Plot twist that still cracks me up: most MEPs who voted were actually against it.
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775 The vote wasnāt a direct āyes/no on Chat Control.ā It was a motion to reject it.
But killing it needed an absolute majority of 361 votes, and we didnāt hit the number. So a rule the majority in the room voted no on is now live until 2028, thanks to voting math and a cheeky fast-track right before summer break. Cool cool cool.
I did my part
Not an MEP, just a guy who cares. In the earlier rounds I did the noisy-citizen thing: posted about it online, explained it to friends IRL, tried to get people to see that ājust scanning messages to catch bad guysā is nowhere near as harmless as it sounds.
I emailed the Italian MEPs too. Multiple times.
Reply rate: ~2% (yes, 98% left me on read lol). Felt like yelling into the void for a while.
But I wasnāt yelling alone. A ton of other people kept posting and refusing to shut up, and together we got loud enough to reach some very busy ears. That āmajority voted againstā result didnāt happen by accident.
Italy showed up! š¤š
Small flex: from what I saw, Italy was the one country where a clear majority of our MEPs voted against it. Was genuinely proud of that. We pulled up.
It just wasnāt enough this round. But heads up: this was only the interim version. The real fight over the permanent one (āChat Control 2.0ā) kicks off again in September, and after this week, pushing a permanent version through is gonna be rough for them.
What to actually do from today
Quick practical bit. Assume anything you send on a platform that is not end-to-end encrypted can get scanned.
Thatās DMs on Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, Xbox, plus normal email like Gmail and iCloud. Keep the sensitive stuff off them:
| Donāt send this via non-E2E apps | Send it here instead |
|---|---|
| Photo of your ID or a document | Signal, in person, or a proper secure-share tool |
| Health info, diagnosis, therapy stuff | Signal, Mail but within password protected .zip |
| Passwords, bank details, home address | A password manager, never a chat box |
Simple rule: if the platform could read it, assume something eventually will.
Stick to E2E encrypted apps like WhatsApp or Signal (my personal go-to) for anything sensitive.
Where Iām actually hyped
Hereās the funny part. Only now that itās actually passed, Iām suddenly seeing way more media coverage about it. Regular news, not just the usual privacy-nerd corners of the internet. And Iām seeing non-techy people, people who never cared about this stuff before, actually starting to take it seriously. Nothing like a law finally landing to make people go āwait, what?ā LOL.
And honestly thatās exactly why I see a real future for tech like peer-to-peer, not as a buzzword but as an architecture. No central server holding everyoneās messages means no chokepoint for anyone to scan. Privacy stops being a promise a vote can delete and becomes something baked into how the app is built.
Thatās why Iām all in on stuff like Pears (Pear Runtime, by the Holepunch team, backed by Tether). Open-source runtime for fully P2P apps, zero traditional servers, your app just runs directly between the people using it. Their chat app Keet calls itself āthe chat app that knows nothing,ā because thereās literally no server that could know. Thereās already a P2P password manager (PearPass), P2P tunnels, local-first AI, all on the same idea.
Now stack that on the other big shift: shipping software isnāt gatekept anymore. With modern tooling, yeah, AI-assisted self-built software included, basically anyone with a laptop and an idea can build their own app that actually respects them. More awareness meets more people who can just build the thing instead of waiting for a platform to grant them privacy. That combo, P2P plus everybody being able to ship their own software, is whatās taking control of our data back into our own hands.
So no, a bad vote isnāt making me log off. If anything it makes the mission obvious. Rules that treat every citizen as a suspect are the best possible argument for infrastructure that literally canāt comply, because thereās nothing in the middle to hand over.
We lost a vote, not the direction. Full data ownership and real digital sovereignty, thatās where weāre going, and this time we get to build it ourselves.
Onward. See you in September. š“āā ļø
Sources
Little bonus if you arrived all the way down here:
